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Monday, July 27, 2015

VIDEO: Anderson Cooper Gets Trumped, And What Scott Walker Could Learn From It | The Hayride

VIDEO: Anderson Cooper Gets Trumped, And What Scott Walker Could Learn From It | The Hayride: "Over the weekend Walker, whose stance on immigration has evolved quite a bit but now seems to have settled on a relatively hard line not just on illegals and controlling the border but on looking at placing tighter limits on legal immigration until the massive backlog of Americans who can’t find work gets cleared, was accosted in Iowa by the open-borders crowd in the person of an illegal immigrant from Wisconsin who accused him of trying to break up his family…
Walker didn’t do a bad job handling a hostile situation from a bunch of obnoxious peope attempting to ambush him. In fact, he was fairly presidential in how he handled the interview – he was firm but polite and he stayed on message throughout the encounter. He also shut down the activists who had sponsored the illegals to accost him by refusing to discuss anything with them; as it turns out they actually drove the family to Iowa in a bus from Waukesha, which tells you all you need to know about how organic this confrontation was.
But outside of the political junkies and news media, you didn’t see more than a blip out of this affair – because while Walker handled it exactly as a professional politician would be expected to, there was no news in it.
He could have turned that into a perfect, defining moment and solidified his street cred with the conservative base – something he’ll need to do, because unlike Trump Walker has a real shot at being president in January 2017.
What Walker could have done is to – before allowing his harasser to say a word in response to his position statement – demand to know how it is the man has his job. “Did they hire you off the books? Or do you have a Social Security number?”
And when the expected answer came, next up would be “So you’re using somebody else’s Social Security number. That’s identity theft, you know, and it’s a crime.”
Walker could then say “Look, I don’t bear you any ill will, and in your situation I can’t say I would have done much different from what you’ve done. All right? And I’m not somebody you should have any special fear of. But you’re here illegally, and you’re using somebody else’s Social Security number so you can take a job from one of the 93 million American citizens who aren’t in the work force, which as far as I’m concerned is the biggest problem this country has and you’re not part of the solution to it.
“So I don’t know what it is you think I’m going to do for you. You want amnesty? OK, great. It’s pretty clear Congress isn’t interested in giving you that. You want Obama to do something he can’t legally do and give you amnesty? Well, that’s piling illegality on top of illegality, and at some point everybody decides they want to play. They’ll decide that not paying taxes works better for them, or moving into some vacant house and not paying for it. Or dumping industrial waste in the river. And then we have chaos.
“If we’re going to do anything for you – give you a permit to live and work here, or a path to citizenship or something – then we’re going to need to have an economy that booms to such an extent that we come to you and say ‘what can we do for you?’ because we have a labor shortage and we need more Americans. Until then? Frankly, you really can’t complain about your situation and you definitely can’t make demands to be given better treatment than the citizens of this country who aren’t getting served all that well.”
Most people haven’t really thought about the illegal immigration question in quite the terms Walker had it presented to him in Iowa over the weekend – namely, that he’s being accosted by illegal aliens who are making demands of him and making him out to be a bad guy because he’s not willing to change the law to give them something they didn’t earn. The ingratitude and, frankly, greed of that really ought to rankle."